Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I listened to his tale, gumming my bean-and-sausage mush. Another coffee. The ascent of the alp, in this weather, could be indefinitely postponed. Behind us, at the table next to the door, sat three all-day-breakfasters as unlikely as ourselves. A woman who used words like ‘altruism’ and ‘atrophy’. A sallow dude who spoke of weekends in Milan and Venice. An older woman who knew how to cook. English was their common language, but not their native tongue, they used it to greater effect than anyone else in the caff. They treated the experience of English eggs and bacon ironically.

Let it go. Commentary is not compulsory. This isn’t radio. You don’t have to notice every colourful detail. Drink your coffee. And get back to the road.

Track read Danny’s Plotlands book. Danny fiddled with his black box, adjusting dials, tapping keys, making notes in a ruled ledger. I prepared for the coming alpine assault by dipping into Arthur Norton’s journals. Trying to find a clue to his state of mind at the time of his expedition to the Peruvian interior, the vanishing.

Retirement came early.

For the next ten years I extracted as much enjoyment out of life as perhaps ever falls to the lot of ordinary unambitious mortals; but at the end of this time I fell among thieves and, as misfortunes rarely come single, the Hemileia must needs play havoc with securities in Ceylon at the same time, so that I began to look abroad again for investments and occupation, resulting in a trip to Tasmania, an adventure much talked of with friends now gone, Skeat,J.W. Birch and L J. Petit.

I resolved, a sum of £2,000 wasted, in the unrewarded pursuit of precious metals, to attempt the only remaining sub-continent that I had never visited, South America. My age and partial incapacity, a troublesome knee-joint, should have argued against the enterprise. Sensations of doubt and uncertainty, premonitions derived from the belief that no free-born Scotsman had any business in a land bedevilled by Papist rogues and cassocked inebriates, could keep me from Tilbury, and my passage, by way of the islands of Barbadoes and Jamaica, to the Isthmus of Panama. It remains my strongest conviction, however, that the great lesson of travel is that we learn to better appreciate the qualities of the land we have left behind; perhaps for the last time.

Beckton: a fake alp under real snow, a marvel. The ascent, Dante-fashion, is like unspooling apple peel, tracking ghosts. A man-made Glastonbury Tor with a ski-lift (hidden by boards, protective fences). Slowly, curve by curve, viewing platform by viewing platform, the wonder of the thing, the spread of ersatz London (much brown, some grey), is revealed.

Danny’s brass rods, lightly held by frozen hands, swivel and cross, as he locates the spiral energy, the heat-core of the demolished gasworks. The alp’s a true illusion. Built on rubble, stepped like a Mayan pyramid, this is a bespoke ziggurat designed to be lost, secreted in Guatemalan jungle. The alp is so much in the way that nobody notices it. They rush on, never appreciating its generosity. Being nothing in itself, a bump, a wart, the ski slope offers: prospects. Somewhere to pause, look back. Look forward. Weigh a life in the balance. Blue Surrey hills (Italianate water towers, TV transmitters) to Epping Forest. The cold, glacial torrent of the A13 doing the work of the antiquated Thames.

There is such clarity of light in the temporary suspension of the mundane, the after-effect of snowshowers. Arctic Albion. High air so clean that it hurts our lungs. The division of spoils, Docklands towers, sugar factory smoke over Silvertown, Upton Park football stadium, Jewish Cemetery beside outfall walk, is as blatant as a boardgame, a three-dimensional map.

Beckton, for me, completes one of London’s significant triangula-tions. I’ll leave the church, the abbey and the holy well, to Chris Street. And stick with Greenwich Hill, the missing mound of Whitechapel (to the west of the London Hospital) and Beckton Alp. Natural and manufactured elevations. Offering: vision. An aerofilm pattern of constructed things. The lie of the land. Rivers, clay. A basin of eels and veins.

A short puff to the summit for a large reward; even eyes as blooded and tired as mine can be scraped and rinsed. The mound is an eye : jacketed in mud, turf, beer cans and a light dressing of slush. Industrial quantities of shaving foam. I thought of a Los Angeles crime scene, described in a film book: a manager (pimp) who had shot his unfaithful protégée, before putting the gun into his own mouth. Sucking fire. The New York journalist, cranking up the metaphors, explained how the intimate blast had taken out so much bone, armature, that the face had slipped into a single-eye mask: Cyclops. A blind, black hole at the centre of the forehead.

Beckton was Cyclops.

Beckton was the missing eye of Rooster Cogburn (in Henry Hathaway’s sentimental western). John Wayne’s capacious socket stuffed with true grit.

White eye speared by Dennis Hopper: in the form of a raven. Odin.

Or Kirk Douglas, Jewish-Russian-Californian, as Viking beserker, showboating his deformity. (The missing hand of Tony Curtis. The stump waved at stalled motorists under the unfinished A13 flyover.)

Panoptic eye at the roadside, albumen and blacktop. Surveillance systems operated by the monocular dead of the Estuary, bomber pilots, accidents of heavy plant, gas explosions.

Ascending, sightless, we would learn to see: Danny by touch, Track by good-humoured detachment, and myself — by fear. Of age, death, impotence. The spectacle of open land denied. The click of the ski-lift. The creaking of panels in the protective fence. Hot steam from the retail park.

I took Danny’s dowsing rods; my breath was coming hard, the climb was longer and sharper than I remembered. It was disconcerting, not being able to locate the summit, not anticipating the next blind corner, feeling the rods dig into the palms of my hands.

At the penultimate turn, the rim of the western slope, above the Alamo of the retail park, its imported eclecticism, Woolworths and Matalan, World of Leather, light overwhelmed me. I staggered, fell. Reached out for support.

By and by the heart’s action seemed to fail, and I suddenly collapsed, slipped off the saddle and lay down on my back, my mule gasping for breath beside me. When I gradually came to myself, I could see around me the bones of many a good mule and llama, cleanly picked, while high in the air floated the ever alert condor, said to be the largest and most powerful of all birds; but I was not just then in a mood to admire his proportions nor appreciate his attentions, and, gathering myself together again with the help of a more fortunate companion, I moved on, but only for fifty yards, when I again fainted. This was repeated at least fifty times till the crest was crossed and some progress was made down the western slopes.

Limp as laundry, I sat, head between knees. Danny, tactful or unobservant, lumbered about the tree line, noting buried electrical cables, the lively detritus of the old gasworks. Track kept going too: under the fence, onward and upward.

DANGER/BATTER/UNSTABLE.

The ski-slope had been dismantled, asset-stripped. Waffle-texture matting peeled away, to reveal spoilt ground: deadwhite. Skin under plaster. The slope was no longer a slope, but a series of steps, wet concrete platforms. The lift mechanism had been excavated. The Swiss Chalet that served abominable hot chocolate (dun-coloured Swarfega) had been detonated. The scam was discontinued. The alp would be absorbed, no doubt, into the London Industrial Park.

But I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t work my eyes. Arthur Norton’s voice, his ride across the Peruvian mountain range, altitude sickness, falling from the mule, still echoed in my head.